


Invocation

by berlincorpography



Category: Wolf Hall Series - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Gen, allusions to brexit, character study but the character is england
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:14:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28657809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/berlincorpography/pseuds/berlincorpography
Summary: Let us populate the world with ghosts.
Kudos: 7





	Invocation

The dead do not rise again. That is a privilege reserved for one man, and if good King Arthur has not seen fit to disturb his slumbers through these centuries of catastrophe, it is not for us to wake him. Yet if the dead do not rise, they do return: bones singing beneath the high altars, leaching through clay into water, lapping at our foundations. There is too much history in this soil for a body to rest easy within it.

So, standing at the raw edge of a new decade, before a new England, call him back: Thomas Cromwell, broad-shouldered, quick-witted, as ready with a kick as with a handshake. But know that the dead do not always come in the forms that we expect; to them, all eras are one. Will it be Earl Essex that we receive, eyes open to the bare boards as a shadow flits across the scaffold? Baron Cromwell in his pomp? Or plain Tom with his face smashed in on the stones of his father's yard; Tommaso-to-be romping through Putney and off to war?

And will we astound him, do you think, with the fruits of our new era? Some ghosts watch the living, as Wolsey's did, and certainly Cromwell in life had his spies everywhere, but surely he would not have remained silent had he persisted here beyond his death. Happier to think that he found the crack in the light at the last; that, Purgatory or no, his spirit rested somewhere far away from this gloomy isle.

What will he make of us now: our hectoring men, our educated women, our Babel of tongues? Our green and pleasant land, growing warmer and damper by the year. Our newfound isolation is unlikely to surprise him, but it may exasperate. Perhaps, by way of compensation, we will introduce him to Shakespeare; we suspect he will find much to admire in the work of that arrogant glover's son.

Or perhaps we will give him more familiar company? To set him at his ease, let us populate the world with ghosts; the history beneath our history. Eustache Chapuys, trotting over for dinner through the Channel Tunnel. Henry's barge rowing the Thames, cloth of gold soiled by the oily wake of the dredgers. Gregory at the foot of the office blocks that now occupy Austin Friars, glancing back at his father's window through the splintering light of centuries. Let us reopen the old sores of the body politic, till like the Wound Man it raises its hands in surrender or defiance.

Call back the other ghosts, too: the lies told so loudly they become history, and the things that haunt the margins of it. The myth of glorious isolation in a continent lost to goose-stepping barbarism. The ships criss-crossing the sea with their cargoes of spice and slaves. The shadow history of Peterloo, Jarrow, Orgreave. Sometimes absence speaks louder than presence, so call back the absences as well: the silenced women, lost tongues, burnt landing cards. Let us have a reckoning.

Call them all back, but first of all call him: he, Cromwell. Do it now, before the world remakes itself once more. Turn out the light. Open the door. Bid him welcome.

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished The Mirror & the Light and something about its evocation of an isolated, plague-ridden island on the edge of Europe, at the mercy of an erratic and profoundly self-centred leader... kind of resonated, you know?


End file.
